Our research project was aimed at teaching high-school pupils game design skills and raising their awareness for the subject area “informatics and society.” A project-based-teaching approach enabled us to incorporate social learning by having teams of pupils work on informatics-and-society topics and subsequently design their own games. The focus of this article is an online survey conducted twice, at the beginning and end of the pupils’ project participation, showing if and how the participants’ attitudes towards and awareness of informatics and society changed during this school year. We discuss the most important survey results, also in relation to studies on internet use of adolescents in the German-speaking countries. Additionally, an evaluation group discussion with the involved teachers provides expert validity. We found that our project-based and social-learning approach was successful in raising awareness for informatics and society as well as in teaching game design.

This article discusses the use of game design as a method for interdisciplinary project-based teaching in secondary school education to convey informatics and society topics, which encompass the larger social context of computing. There is a lot of knowledge about learning games but little background on using game design as a method for project-based teaching of social issues in informatics. We present the results of an analysis of student-created games and an evaluation of a student-authored database on learning contents found in commercial off-the-shelf games. We further contextualise these findings using a group discussion with teachers. The results underline the effectiveness of project-based teaching to raise awareness for informatics and society topics. We further outline informatics and society topics that are particularly interesting to students, genre preferences, and potentially engaging game mechanics stemming from our analyses.

The paper deals with developing learning games in the area of informatics and society in an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers, university students, and high school students in Vienna, Austria. In this project, we apply mixed methods to ensure meaningful results. Playing research and game analysis are supposed to prepare secondary school students for the task of designing and creating learning games in a participatory setting, using explorative design and design thinking. The students are supported in doing so by the academics. The researchers will also evaluate the outcomes. The paper presents the first examples of informatics and society learning games and use the following approaches to trigger learning experiences: humor and exaggeration, shift of perspective, the presentation of facts, and trial and error. These results from the early stages of the project are encouraging and hint at the possible success of playful participation in the field of game-based learning.

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This article discusses the use of game design as a method for interdisciplinary project-based teaching in secondary school education to convey informatics and society topics. There is a lot of knowledge about learning games but little background on project-based teaching using game design as a method. We present the results of an analysis of student-created games and an evaluation of a student-authored database on learning contents found in commercial off-the-shelf games. We further contextualise these findings using a group discussion with teachers. Results underline the effectiveness of project-based teaching to raise awareness for informatics and society topics. We further outline informatics and society topics that are particularly interesting to students, genre preferences and potentially engaging game mechanics stemming from our analyses.